Thursday 23rd March 2006
Single ‘Lucky Like That’ released May 15th
Album ‘Trinity’ released June 5th
“I remember when I was younger,” begins Lynsey Brown, one third of Britain’s poppiest girlband. “You’d get the pop magazines and you’d sit around with your mates, arguing. ‘I like the Spice Girls!’ ‘P*** off – All Saints are better!’ There’d be a debate about pop music. At the moment everyone likes the same thing. Everyone’s got the same CD collection. Where’s the passion? We need to mix things up again.”
Their new single, a jaunty little number by the name of ‘Lucky Like That’, is a sneak preview of an album bristling with chart-friendly sounds – an album which, the girls hope, will kick-start a new era in pop. There’s no denying that Clea (Lynsey, plus Aimee Kearsley and Emma Beard) have the credentials – flick through the Most Played playlists on their iPods and there’s no denying their dedication to the cause. These girls live and breathe pop music – loving it, dancing to it, arguing about it and, most importantly, making it. No pretensions, no hang-ups – just 100% solid pop music.
“’Lucky Like That’ is a simple song,” Aimee explains, “about a boy and a girl at the start of a new relationship – it’s from a young girl’s point of view and it’s about the impression of being with someone new and it being perfect.” “We feel really strongly that not all love songs have to be ‘oh boo hoo he’s left me and I’m gutted’,” adds Lynsey, “and the thing we wanted to get across was that while most relationships reach a sticky end, every single relationship anyone’s ever had has got a brilliant start. That’s something everyone who’s ever been in a relationship can relate to.”
The girls’ approach to their music’s sound is similarly unbothered by prescribed notions of credibility. “We’re all about bringing straightforward pop music back,” Emma explains. “We don’t need Pharrell’s beats, or a clever song structure – ours is the same sort of music that made East 17 or Take That or the Spice Girls big. It’s not trying to be anything - it just is what it is.” At a time when pop is a game of bluff and double bluff, it’s a refreshingly honest approach.
Clea met four years ago on a TV show. You might say that they could have been Girls Aloud, or even that Girls Aloud could have been Clea, but that wouldn't be quite right, because Girls Aloud are Girls Aloud and Clea are definitely Clea, with a three-year career under their belts and a vision so fine-tuned that this has become a proposition quite unlike anything else out there right now. What we have before us today is a fully-formed, fully developed girlgroup writing P-O-P in letters big enough to stick in the Hollywood hills.
They’re also gloriously unbothered by perceived trends or the approval of the broadsheets, because they’re communicating directly with their fans. They've set up a MySpace page, nurtured a burgeoning online community of fans and even issue their own podcasts through iTunes. Without falling into the current mainstream trap of sitting around waiting for major labels to wake up to themselves, Clea are getting on with the business of throwing their music out there. Why wait? Signed to their management’s own independent label, Clea are doing what any new band would traditionally be doing – going out, gigging, getting their hands dirty and generally having the time of their lives. From an unlikely background, theirs is an independent spirit quite at odds with the perceived behaviour of a mainstream pop act, and they're certainly not in it for the money or the glamour.
With this new approach has come a renewed clarity. Though they’re rightly proud of the successes they scored with early hits ‘Download It’ and ‘Stuck in The Middle’, they’ve grown up a lot in the last couple of years, obtaining a great new perspective on the early part of their career. Since original member Chloe left the group (“oddly, I’ve since stopped taking Prozac,” Lynsey laughs), Clea have been able to knuckle down and get things moving. “The moment Chloe left was the moment the band really began,” Emma says. Musically there’s been a huge shift in emphasis, too. “Most of the time we were just given a song and we sang it,” Aimee grimaces. “I suppose we were so glad to be in a band that we just didn’t care.”
Of course, cynics might wonder why the girls were so keen to promote their earlier releases if they weren’t fully behind them. More importantly, why should we trust them this time? Lynsey is disarmingly frank. “We barely said actually anything at the time, to be honest,” she laughs. “We’d had so much bloody media training that we were just going through the motions. Behind the scenes we were going, ‘Should this really be the single?’ But when you’ve got the head of Warners going ‘We’ve spent the money, this is the single’, what can you do? We cringe looking back now. We just stuck to the script.”
Typically, Emma finds the good in this awkward situation. “What all that means is that over the last 18 months, we’ve been able to write for ourselves, choose who we work with and which songs we want, and which image we want. We’ve found out who we are.” And as Lynsey points out, major label budgets are all very well, but “just because you’re getting £100k spent on your video, it doesn’t mean it’s the right video. We’re getting everything spot on now.”
The result is ‘Trinity’, their debut album (or second, if you include ‘Identity Crisis’, which hit charts in several countries outside the UK in 2004). ‘Trinity’, inspired by both Clea’s new line-up and London’s Trinity Church Road, where the girls first lived when they moved to the capital, is packed with bright and fizzy mainstream music splashed with buckets of primary coloured pop paint. “There’s R&B, pure pop, ballads, then rocky sounding tunes and all the elements of what’s great about pop music,” Aimee adds. Unapologetic for their mainstream sensibilities, they’ve found their groove, and they couldn’t be happier. Indeed, while the album is packed with uncomplicated, straightforward pop songs, their attitude to pop stardom is cheeringly open. Aimee, particularly, keeps in mind the balls and sass of the Spice Girls at their peak. “That’s something the Spice Girls will always have – they were so outspoken but everything they said was worth listening to because you knew they were being honest. Just five girls having a laugh.” If you want to see a 2006 spin on the girls-having-a-laugh pop ethic, look no further than the ‘Lucky Like That’ video, which finds the girls in a variety of costumes including, at one point, electricians’ outfits.
“What we’re not going to do is cave in and follow trends,” Lynsey insists. “There’s no point in us going off down a shop and coming back with guitars and drum kits – it’s not us. There are enough people like that and we simply don’t want to do singer songwritery music – I might as well go and work in a shop. We like to do dance routines, we like pop music – that’s what we need to do!” What they’d also like to do, they say, is remind everyone how great pop should be. “At the moment, everyone’s scared to put their money into pop,” Lynsey declares. “We want to show that it can work…”
David Jensen Photography:
https://www.davidjensen.co.uk/
